How to Earn Money with a Blog

Make Money with Squidoo

I know I’ve written about Squidoo often on my blogs, but it never hurts to mention them again, especially as I’m starting an experiment to make money from them.

Anyone who’s played with Squidoo lenses already knows that they can be used in a number of different ways to make money as well as drive traffic and nice one-way inbound links to your blogs and websites. One of these ways to make money is to promote affiliate products both on your blogs and your lenses, doubling the exposure thereby increasing the chance of capturing sales.

But there’s another way.

It’s not well known, so I’m going to let you in on a small secret…

You should avoid promoting anything to do with Internet Marketing, because it’s such a tough niche to crack. You should also avoid the usual suspects like Clickbank et al if you want to follow in my experiment, because they are also done to death and everyone and their dog is getting in on the act!

You need to find smaller affiliate programs – there are plenty to be found using Google – and work directly with them as well as mixing it up with some bigger ones like Commission Junction and Linkshare.

Then you need to do some serious keyword research.

I didn’t say it would be easy.

Once you have your killer keywords for some less well known but highly searched products, go through your affiliate companies until you find a few that sell the products you want to promote.

Then create your Squidoo lens. Make it a good one, using your keywords sensibly in the title as well as in the body. Write good reviews of the products you’re promoting and make those reviews keyword rich (but don’t keyword stuff them or it’ll work against you). Use your social networks to promote your new lens – tag it and stumbleupon it, you know the ones that work best to get traffic to the lens.

You’ll find is you get your keywords right that the lens will get high in the search engines and you should get some good targeted visitors, some of whom should convert into customers.

Ok, you probably won’t make a fortune with just one lens. It is also a fair bit of work, but the income will be steady as long as you keep you lens up to date and regularly updated with new content.

Then if you have the time, find more products with good keywords and make more lenses. If you can convert around a conservative $50 a month with one lens, would ten lenses make you smile?

I’m glad you found me too. Thanks for taking time to give your thumbs up to this post! I’ve actually been experimenting with lenses for a while now, but this is the first time I’m branching out into a niche I’m not familiar with – and I’ll be doing that with several niches. So it really is an experiment for me to see if I can make money outside my usual sphere!
Terry